Louisiana and
Mississippi, on the ground that the men who pay the taxes should vote
them and control the disbursement of the public moneys. The gentlemen
who advance this argument seem to ignore the fact that the very
Northerner whom they are seeking to convert to "the Mississippi plan"
may himself be a taxpayer in some Northern city, where public affairs
are controlled by a class of voters in every way as ignorant and
irresponsible as the blacks, but where bulldozing has never yet
been suggested as a remedy. For the rest, the evidences of political
oppression are abundant and convincing. The bulldozers as a class are
more impecunious and irresponsible than the negroes, and, unlike the
negroes, they will not work. There has been more of the "night-riding,"
the whippings, the mysterious disappearances, the hangings, and the
terrorism comprehended in the term bulldozing than has been reported
by those "abstracts and brief chronicles of the time," the Southern
newspapers, which are now all of one party, and defer to the ruling
sentiment among the whites. The exodus has wrung from two or three of
the more candid and independent journals, however, a virtual confession
of the fiendish practices of bulldozing in their insistance that these
practices must be abandoned. The non-resident land owners and the
resident planters, the city factors and the country merchants of means
and respectability, have taken no personal part in the terrorizing of
the negro, but they have tolerated it, and sometimes encouraged it, in
order to gratify their preference for "white government." The negroes
have suffered the more because they have not resisted and defended
themselves; now they have begun to convince those who have persecuted
them that, if they will not strike back, they can and will run away.
No one who is at all familiar with the freedman can doubt that the
abridgment of his political rights has been one of the main causes of
the exodus. Voting is widely regarded at the North as a disagreeable
duty, but the negro looks upon it as the highest privilege in life; to
be frightened out of the exercise of this privilege, or compelled to
exercise it in conflict with his convictions and preferences, is to
suffer from a cruel injustice, which the negro will now try to escape,
since he has learned that escape is possible. The women, though free
from personal assaults, suffer from the terrorism that prevails in
certain districts as much as the me